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Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Refugee Identities At The Mercy Of Legal Determination, Rosário Frada

Saint Louis University Law Journal

The Refugee Status Determination process bears immediate repercussions not only on the formulation of refugee narrative identities, but on how asylum-seekers construct their very sense of self alongside their relationship to their past and future. Yet, International Refugee Law provides no guidance over status determination procedures, establishing a legal void that confers disproportionate power to State discretion. In an epoch characterized by exclusionary non-entrée regimes propelled by a post-9/11 securitization logic, the myopic fixation on border control has generated a dehumanizing surveillance machinery that transformed the asylum system into a threatening opponent of refugee protection, eliminating individual subjectivity and undermining …

Table Of Contents

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Doing Less—Reflections On Cognitive Load And Hard Choices In Teaching First-Year Legal Writing, Ellie Margolis

Saint Louis University Law Journal

The evolving landscape of legal research and writing (LRW) education requires LRW professors to balance a multitude of expectations and demands in the process of teaching foundational skills and ensuring that students are “practice-ready.” This essay argues that attempting to cover too wide an array of skills and competencies often leads to ineffective learning outcomes and suggests that a “less is more” approach may be more beneficial. It explores the challenges faced by LRW professors in teaching a comprehensive set of skills while ensuring students can transfer their learning to new contexts. Drawing on research and personal teaching experiences, the …

The Adaptable Legal Writer, Katrina Lee

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Today, more than ever, lawyers must constantly adapt—quickly and with deliberateness. This Article shines a light on the need to teach law students adaptability in law practice, and the central role of the legal writing professor in that endeavor. Part II explores the need for adaptability in a lawyer’s career. Part III provides an overview of three adaptability approaches from the legal writing pedagogy literature: information literacy, genre discovery, and the contextual case method. Part IV closes with a reflection on key features of adaptability pedagogy in legal writing—curiosity, inquisitiveness, and ethicality—and its general application in legal education. At heart …

Flattening The Learning Curve For International J.D. Students, Sylvia Lett

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Non-U.S. lawyers entering U.S. law schools in accelerated J.D. degree programs (known as the “AJD” – Advanced Juris Doctor Program at Arizona Law) face particular challenges adapting to 1L legal research, analysis, and communication classes. First, English is not the typical lingua franca for AJD students, many of whom come from civil law countries and are faced with the challenge of learning legal writing methods for an American common-law legal system. Second, AJD students earn a U.S. J.D. degree in only two years because these accelerated programs give one year of “credit” for their non-U.S. law degrees. As a consequence, …

And The Results Are In … Reviewing The Results Of The First Year Larc Research Exam Wherein Some Of The Questions Were Redesigned To Meet The Expectations Of The Next Gen Bar Exam Format, Christine E. Rollins

Saint Louis University Law Journal

In 2010, the faculty of St. Louis University School of Law implemented a research exam to test student competencies after their first year of law school. Since its creation, the exam has helped students feel more secure starting their first legal internships, allowed faculty to identify areas of decreased competency, and helped faculty find “better” ways to teach legal research and writing material. In anticipation of the implementation of the NextGen Bar exam in July 2026, the faculty determined that it was necessary to make some changes to the research exam in order to both gather data on students’ responses …

Distraction Or Necessity: A Post-Pandemic Examination Of Digital Devices In The Law School Classroom, Marcia Goldsmith, Karen Sanner

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Digital devices are a constant presence in the law school classroom; however, faculty members and students report mixed feelings about the role of digital devices in the classroom learning experience. While data suggests that use of digital devices has a deleterious effect on acquiring and retaining information, digital device usage is sometimes helpful and often necessary to facilitate learning in the modern law school classroom.

This article draws upon ideas from Professor James M. Lang in his book Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About (Hatchette Book Group Inc. 1st ed. 2020), identifies the reasons that …

Teamwork Makes A Dream Work: Collaboration In The Legal Writing, Brenda D. Gibson

Saint Louis University Law Journal

This essay provides insights into the benefits (and some of the challenges) encountered when two relatively seasoned legal writing professors decided to collaborate in their first-year legal writing courses. The essay, in self-deprecating candor, describes how my colleague and I leveraged our individual strengths to improve our legal writing students’ learning experience. Along the way, a friendship, born of deep respect, was formed.

Collaboration defined simply is no more than “a process of working with others to accomplish something.”[1] To that end, collaborative teaching, i.e., team teaching is typically two or more faculty members working together to develop instructional …

“With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility”: Improving Your Feedback And Hallmarks Of Effective Feedback, Randall P. Ryder

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Effective feedback can change a law student’s trajectory in law school and beyond. The feedback-centric nature of experiential learning courses allows law students to both develop their skills and personal lawyering style. However, many experiential instructors are from a different generation, with different expectations and communication styles than today’s law students. This article highlights hallmarks of effective feedback for the modern law school classroom. As the field of law continues to evolve, law schools will need to as well.

This article discusses four key hallmarks: (1) provide feedback in multiple formats,(2) help each student develop their personal style, (3) explain …

Context Matters For Deep Knowledge: What Cognitive Science Can Teach Us About Legal Writing, Anna F. Connolly

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Many law school graduates are entering the workforce unable to write well. The legal field requires so much writing, yet law schools emphasize neither writing nor practical skills. We need not overhaul law school curricula to address the problem. Cognitive science teaches us that students internalize material when they understand the context. Without context, even the best planned lessons will remain only “shallow knowledge.” To create “deep knowledge,” we must provide context: students must know why they are writing. For example, a student asked to write a motion to dismiss the complaint has the best chance of success if they …

The Role Of Historic Preservation In St. Louis Vacancy Solutions, Mary Webb

Saint Louis University Law Journal

The homes of St. Louis, Missouri reflect the diverse backgrounds of the families who built them. As the need for labor grew during the City’s “brick boom,” families from the American South and from around the world immigrated to St. Louis, bringing unique architectural history with them. This history is now threatened by St. Louis’s rising vacancy rates.

The long-term impacts of racial zoning ordinances, restrictive deed covenants, and redlining have led to dense vacancy in North St. Louis neighborhoods. Crime, public health, and economic concerns follow vacant properties, adversely impacting North St. Louis individuals, families, and businesses.

Demolition has …

Teaching And Learning About Implicit Bias In The Legal Practice Classroom: The Lesson Of Sandy Jordan, Anupama C. Connor

Saint Louis University Law Journal

“Implicit bias” describes the unconscious stereotypes and attitudes that all humans have hard wired in their brains. It can go awry when we have implicit biases based on race or ethnicity that are unrealized and unfair. Gen Z students are famously diverse, and they are proud of their diversity, but they are also uncomfortable talking about sensitive topics, including implicit bias. Legal Practice professors are in a unique position to work with their Gen Z students to identify and eliminate implicit bias because of our year-long course and the interactive nature of our class. This article discusses how implicit bias …

Masthead

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Artificial Intelligence And The Practice Of Law: A Chat With Chatgpt, Grant M. Gamm

Saint Louis University Law Journal

In late 2022, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the world. At the time of writing this article, ChatGPT and other generative AI models were no longer used only to generate silly responses but were being considered for substantive work in our daily lives. Specifically, this article highlights how ChatGPT and other learned language models can have a strong impact on the practice of law. Within this article, the uses of these forms of AI are explained on multiple levels: the individual attorney, the law firm, and the non-attorney. Along with its diverse applications, this article delves into potential ethical dilemmas and …

Prioritizing Student Well-Being: Name And Pronoun Policies In K-12 Schools, Manni Jandernoa

Saint Louis University Law Journal

While federal protections against discrimination for LGBTQ students have increased in the past few years, at the same time state legislatures have proposed hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills targeting transgender youth. With more students identifying as transgender or nonbinary, there is a need for clear policies on the usage of chosen names and pronouns in K-12 public schools. Schools need to be prepared to handle transgender and nonbinary students before a need arises. This article discusses the potential conflicts between the individual interests involved when name and pronoun policies are applied in K-12 public schools.

When drafting and enforcing name and …

Better Together: Building Community In The Lrw Classroom, Olympia Duhart

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Better Together: Building Community in the LRW Classroom emphasizes the importance of building a strong community within the Legal Research and Writing (“LRW”) classroom. A robust LRW community helps mitigate the stress associated with the course and equips students to manage the rigorous demands of law school. Given the challenges facing today’s law students and the unique challenges that characterize LRW, developing community in the LRW classroom should be a primary focus of effective law school training. This Article highlights the work of Thomas Hawk and Paul Lyons, who have studied the concept of “pedagogical caring” in higher education. The …

Table Of Contents

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Accommodating Trans Rights, Susan V. Hazeldean

Saint Louis University Law Journal

In the last few years, state legislatures have advanced a record number of bills aimed at restricting the rights of transgender and gender non-conforming people. In the 2023 legislative session alone, 510 bills were introduced across the nation that would ban gender-affirming healthcare, weaken protection from discrimination in employment, public accommodations, and hospitals, censor drag shows, limit access to books about LGBTQ people, and exclude trans people from bathrooms and locker rooms, among other things. To many, these proposed bills are efforts to exclude transgender people from public life and effectively legislate them out of existence. Such attacks are likely …

Debunking The Narrowness Narrative In Lgbtq Religious Exemption Claims, Kyle C. Velte

Saint Louis University Law Journal

In three recent cases—Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, and 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis—the U.S. Supreme Court held in favor of a conservative Christian claimant who sought a religious exemption, reasoning that the First Amendment’s Free Exercise or Free Speech clause exempted the claimant from complying with a validly enacted antidiscrimination provision barring discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Many legal scholars and commentators have decried these decisions as radically altering First Amendment law at the expense of LGBTQ civil rights. In contrast, many national LGBTQ …

Progressive Constitutionalism And Its Libertarian Discontents: The Case Of Lgbtq Rights, Carlos A. Ball

Saint Louis University Law Journal

This Article, based on the 2023 Childress Memorial Lecture given at the Saint Louis University School of Law, argues that libertarian political morality and constitutionalism constitute double-edged swords for progressives. On the one hand, libertarian principles have helped advance some progressive objectives inside and outside of the courts, including several related to LGBTQ rights. On the other hand, libertarian understandings of the Constitution have undermined a wide array of other progressive distributive and egalitarian objectives. In promoting a generalized skepticism of state action, a progressive constitutionalism that embraces (or fails to question) the libertarian ethos of limited government and exclusively …

The Return Of Boy Scouts Of America V. Dale, Elizabeth Sepper

Saint Louis University Law Journal

In 2000, the Supreme Court’s decision in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale seemed to upend the law of freedom of association. Fears surfaced that the right of expressive association would be “an easy trump of any antidiscrimination law”—and perhaps other regulations of conduct. Organizations from schools to employers, social service providers to unions, could mount constitutional claims against the inclusion of individuals unwanted because of their sex, sexuality, race, disability, or beyond.

Instead, lower courts read Dale narrowly. Expressive associational rights would, it seemed, be bound by the facts of the case. Freedom of association would not override equality …

Patterns Of Panic, Anthony Michael Kreis

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Disruptions in the constitutional order can agitate social anxiety, particularly when an out-group on the rise challenges an in-group’s political dominance and position in a constitutional regime. This has been acutely true concerning civil rights expansion, where civil rights opponents have turned to libertarian theories of law when their cultural currency is on the ropes. This essay highlights some of the similarities between libertarian ideological impulses at critical junctures of American constitutional development during Reconstruction and in resistance to the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans in the twenty-first century. In these two crucial moments of constitutional development, …

The Persistent, Solvable Malady Of Law Student Multimedia Multitasking, Patrick Meyer

Saint Louis University Law Journal

In today’s world of popular and enticing social media platforms that constantly lure the attention of students away from course work, many professors find it difficult to keep the attention of their students. There is good reason to be concerned. There are numerous studies from multiple countries at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional school level that find multimedia multitasking during the learning process is detrimental to knowledge retention and grades. This article summarizes many of these studies. More importantly, this paper significantly adds to the body of work on multimedia multitasking by providing anecdotal evidence of its negative effects on …

Bridges You Cannot Burn: Antifragile Dispute Resolution For Children With Disabilities, Michelle Brady

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Families of children with disabilities need an indestructible bridge to their support network. In this article, I use Nassim Taleb’s concept of antifragility to describe ways to resolve conflict that simultaneously strengthen the relationship of the parties. Last year, the Supreme Court decided Perez v. Sturgis Public Schools, in which a public school assigned an unqualified interpreter to Miguel Perez, who is deaf; inflated his grades to inclusion on the honor roll; and refused him graduation. His parents sought relief under two federal disability laws, and the Court unanimously held that the family could recover under both laws, granting …

Transnationalization Of Legal Education: A Confluence Of Multiple Factors Review Of “The Globalization Of Legal Education: A Critical Perspective” By Bryant Garth And Gregory Shaffer, Md. Rizwanul Islam

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Legal education across many parts of the world is increasingly transnationalized. Transnationalized legal education is a metamorphosis propelled by a combination of factors, some endogenous to the law school and legal community, some exogenous to them. This review essay finds that globalization and reform of legal education are often part of a broader change within a state. Any reform of legal education is often chaotic, as it deals with human actors, not with value-free formulas. The engineers of reform of legal education have not been a single or cohesive force, but more often groups of reformers have coalesced with others …

The Strange Persistence Of Originalism, Mark A. Hannah, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Originalism has positioned itself as the au courant doctrine of legal interpretation. Proponents argue that originalism is a core element of our democratic identity and should be adopted by every judge. The originalist tenet—that the meaning of a legal text is the ordinary meaning the text had at the time of its enactment—purportedly provides an objective basis for judging with integrity. Despite originalists’ grandiose claims, critics have lodged many well-reasoned objections that problematize originalists’ goals and methods. Why, then, has originalism gained such widespread prominence? In this article, we offer a rhetorical analysis that explains its ascendance and strange persistence. …

Labor, Authorship, And Unionism In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence, Alexa M. Benson

Saint Louis University Law Journal

The rapid improvement of writing and art created by artificial intelligence (AI) is often discussed as either a revolution in productivity and efficiency, or a uniquely destructive tool that will render human creative labor obsolete. A significant barrier to either claim is that AI-generated works are fundamentally incompatible with copyright as expressed in the United States Constitution and the Copyright Act. It is not clear whether the process of training AI models on copyrighted works is consistent with copyright doctrine. Moreover, the notion of granting copyright protection to AI-generated works conflicts with the constitutional, philosophic, and economic rationales for copyright …

Federalism: Analyses Of Economic Effects Of Domestic Violence On Interstate Commerce Under The U.S. Constitution, Olawale Olumodimu

Saint Louis University Law Journal

This work explains that there are instances where congressional intent may necessitate immediate or sporadic regulation of local or intrastate activities. However, when Congress does act or takes steps to regulate a necessary local or intrastate activity, it must do so only if it is constitutionally proper and when it does not lead to the unfettered accumulation of states’ plenary powers and does not violate the enumeration of constitutional powers. This work bifurcates the U.S. Supreme Court cases on the Commerce Clause into the formalist and realist approaches as provided under Article 1. Section 8, Clause 3 of the Constitution. …